this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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Lefty Memes
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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Jesus fucking Christ, I was just talking to a friend about how big corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees resemble centrally planned economies, and how consolidations creates them all around us and the only thing stopping them from becoming fewer is the attempts of some governments that haven't been regulatory-captured yet to stop it. But regulatory-capture increases with wealth accumulation so if you keep running the system, it tends to total central planning. I haven't read Marx and neither has he.
On a separate but related point - what stops the system from being somewhat disrupted by labor in a way that redistributes huge amounts of the accumulated wealth, restoring the regulatory regime in favor of labor and restarting the cycle from that point, then repeat. In other words, what's stopping it from doing a depression-FDR-redistribution every 100 years? I can absolutely see the inevitable end without labor intervention but to my current brain it seems possible to maintain it with. Is this wrong in some obvious way?
See, this is exactly what Marx was talking about when he said the decay of Capitalism would cause more radicalization and class awareness. What starts off as hard to see due to the vast competition of many competing Capitalits becomes increasingly apparent. Ideas are determined by material conditions.
To answer your question, Social Democracies can help suppress revolution, but not prevent its necessity nor turn back the clock. Technological progress remains, and thus you can't beat the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall. In the modern world, Nordic countries are seeing sliding safety nets, and depend heavily on exploitation of the Global South via exporting Capital to have commoditied made with a lower price of labor (a process Marxists call Imperialism).
Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution actually answers a lot of your question, if you're willing to read a short book. It's in section 4 of my "intro to Marxism" list so it will have terms you may not understand if you don't read the buildup works, but you can still try to read it and see someone answer your very questions 124 years ago.